Download PDF - Howard Hughes Medical Institute

workshop. “They get a day right before the school year begins,”
Felix points out. These workshops are too short to be of much use,
yet districts keep doing them, she says.
SEEING STUDENTS BENEFIT
When done right, however, professional development can make a
real difference for students. Carla C. Johnson, of the University of
Cincinnati, and two colleagues tracked students at a middle school
where all science and math teachers received comprehensive professional
development, including monthly in-school sessions in
which trainers modeled effective instruction and let teachers practice
it. Their students were compared with students at a middle
school in the same district with no such program. After two years
of instruction by these newly trained science teachers, Johnson’s
team gave the seventh-graders a 29-point test to gauge scientific
knowledge and reasoning. They scored 50 percent better than students
of untrained teachers, Johnson and colleagues reported in
2007 in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching. What’s more,
the effects lasted. In 10th grade, 88 percent of the students who
had learned from the specially trained middle school teachers
passed the Ohio Graduation Test on their first try, compared with a
34 percent pass rate among students of the control teachers, Johnson’s
team reported in 2010 in School Science and Mathematics.
Two summers of training in an inquiry-based neuroscience
curriculum was a big help for middle school science teachers in
Minnesota. When science educator Gillian Roehrig and neuroscientist
Jan Dubinsky of the University of Minnesota tested
the impact of the curriculum, called BrainU, they found that the
teachers adopted the methods immediately after the first year,
Dubinsky reported at the 2011 conference of the Association for
Science Teacher Education. However, “after the second year it’s
really transformative in terms of how they’re using inquiry in the
classroom,” Roehrig says.
That was Rachelle Haroldson’s experience. A year after she
completed BrainU’s partner program for
high school science teachers, her students
were dissecting a sheep brain, exploring
how it compared structurally with a human
brain. And after her students assembled
model neurons from beads and string as
they studied neural signaling, she had
them investigate questions like: What is a
drug? If you take a drug, what does it do
to your body? The students learned how
alcohol affects decision making in the
frontal lobes and how marijuana mimics
endogenous cannabinoids. “When they
thought about their brain as a muscle and
that they were weakening it [with drugs],
that seemed to have a profound impact on
them,” Haroldson recalls.
simply not up to speed. They may lack research experience or—
especially in middle schools—they may be teaching a subject for
which they weren’t trained, says developmental biologist Barbara
Wakimoto of the University of Washington in Seattle.
Scientists, like Wakimoto, can play an important role offering
the research experience and inquiry-focused approach. K–12
science education requires a multifaceted strategy that should
involve scientists as well as preservice and in-service training, says
David Asai, HHMI’s undergraduate science education program
director. “The community of scientists, in particular, can provide
excellent ways for in-service teachers to build more inquiry into
their teaching. In-service teachers can be the principal partners
with scientists, who can help develop those tools, and they can be
a huge resource for future teachers.”
Wakimoto and two colleagues run an intensive four-week
summer life sciences teaching institute for 20 Washington State
K–8 teachers. They focus on upper elementary and middle school
teachers because, unlike high school teachers who see their students
for one period a day, these teachers “are with students long
enough to get them excited about science,” Wakimoto says.
Wakimoto and program manager Helen Buttemer show teachers
how to create simple inquiry-based lessons with readily available
materials—for example, testing the adhesive powers of slug slime,
studying lentil seed germination, or observing fruit fly mating rituals.
They train teachers to walk students through a scientific investigation
using a tool called an inquiry board. The teacher records ideas
on an eight-section poster board as the class brainstorms a question,
the variables to test, the controls, the experimental setup, and the
predicted outcome. After the study is completed, the class tabulates
results, looking for patterns, and answers the original question.
Wakimoto’s colleagues follow up by visiting each participating
teacher’s home school, often bringing equipment to lend. “When
we go back to the classrooms, we find these inquiry boards all over
the state,” she says.
Rob Culpepper
HONING SCIENCE SKILLS
To help students learn science through
inquiry, teachers must first understand
how scientific inquiry works. But many are
Spurred by workshops, mentoring, and access to equipment, Alabama teacher Wendy Bramlett
shifted from lectures to hands-on lessons—and her students’ science scores soared.
February 2o12 | HHMI BULLETIN
27